


Benefits and Convenience

by ilien



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Fake Marriage, Friends With Benefits, Happy Ending, M/M, Rated M for Swearing, Russian swearing, a 5+1 that doesn't know how to count to five, happy everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-24
Updated: 2017-08-24
Packaged: 2018-12-17 06:52:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11846235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilien/pseuds/ilien
Summary: All the times Yuri didn’t really want to divorce Minami and one time he did.





	Benefits and Convenience

**Author's Note:**

> Slightly belated happy birthday, Minami!
> 
> Credits for the plot bunny go to the prompt generator. I don’t remember exactly what the prompt was, but it had the ship, ‘fake marriage’ and ‘friends with benefits’ in it. 
> 
> This was originally intended as a 5+1, but, in hindsight, I should have realized Yuri wouldn’t stop at five.
> 
> This is obviously set in a no-homophobia AU where a same-sex marriage is valid all around the world, including Russia and Japan. All visa-related ‘facts’ are completely fictional, but the ‘wedding ceremony’ is a real thing and quotes an actual speech a Russian official gives to the newlyweds (or, at least, one of the versions of it).
> 
> Set a little over three years post-canon.
> 
> This story was betaed by the amazing [CynicInAFishbowl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/CynicInAFishbowl/pseuds/CynicInAFishbowl), all the remaining mistakes are mine.

**1**

“I can—go back to my old coach,” Minami says. “It’s only been a few weeks, I’m sure she’ll take me back.” He looks like he’s pretending the suggestion isn’t breaking his heart. He’s not very good at pretending, obviously. Having Katsudon for a coach might be a setback after Yakov for Yuri, but it’s a dream come true for Minami, and the perspective of losing this dream when he barely got to taste it must be devastating. The thought that it’s partially Yuri’s fault makes Yuri feel—a little uneasy.

But they’re all idiots, obviously. That’s why Yuri’s the first one to come up with the brilliant solution to their ridiculous problem, even though it’s the most obvious solution in the universe, save for the one Victor’s just fucked up.

“With all the rumors about us, the immigration won’t even bother us much,” he tells Kenjirou. “It takes, what, sixty days after the application? You’ve got ninety on your tourist’s visa. We’ll have a month to file for residence permit.”

“I—don’t think it’s a good idea?” Katsudon says. He makes it sound like a question.

“What’s not a good idea?” Minami asks, confused, almost making Yuri take his words back. Wasn’t he clear enough?

“I believe Yurio just proposed to you,” says Victor cheerfully. “About time!”

“He just—what?” Minami looks at Yuri like he really didn’t understand a word that he just heard. Yuri thinks back at his wording. Maybe, just maybe, it requires some elaboration. 

“I said,” he explains, “that if we get hitched, you’ll have a whole month of your stupid tourist’s visa to file for a residence permit.”

“As in, get fake-married for the visa?” Minami looks both terrified and excited at the same time—one of his default expressions.

“Yeah, exactly!” Yuri says. “You won’t even have to leave the country to get the permit! And, like I said, with all the rumors about us, no one will ever suspect it’s fake!”

Ever since he kissed Minami in front of the cameras at Skate Canada last year (he was excited, okay? Minami took silver!), everyone’s been in their hair all the time. The headlines were increasingly ridiculous.

“The new power couple!” 

“Yuri Plisetsky follows his mentor’s footsteps both in skating and his personal life!” 

“Plisetsky moves to Japan to follow his love!” 

The last one was the worst, even worse than the ones that called Nikiforov his ‘mentor’, because Plisetsky moved to Japan to follow his stupid coach totally against his will (and secretly, to eat his coach’s mother’s cooking, so probably not completely against his will, after all), and didn’t even tell Minami he was doing it beforehand. But it did look that way, especially once Victor came up with the idea of Katsudon coaching Minami.

Victor advised them to ignore the rumors, avoid the questions and use ‘no comment’ lavishly, neither admitting nor denying anything, and that’s that they did. He said that every rumor can be turned to one’s favour when the time is right; the fact that he appeared to be right is probably the most annoying part of the whole endeavour. 

“We don’t know each other all that well,” Minami says with doubt, but Yuri can see that he’s considering it. “And don’t you have someone—”

“Yeah, right. I’ve been cheating on both Otabek and JJ with you, and on you with Victor,” Yuri grunts. Every asshole journalist seems to enjoy writing about his imagined personal life these days. “Of course I don’t fucking have a ‘someone’, idiot. I don’t need a ‘someone’, relationships are stupid.” What he has with Minami—an occasional hookup at a competition, plus a booty call or two since they’ve been living in the same country—is exactly as much ‘relationship’ as Yuri can handle.

“That’s a bad idea,” Katsudon says. “Marriage is a serious commitment. You don’t just rush into it like that.”

Yuri loses his patience. “Okay, assholes, we have three choices,” he announces. “One - we all stay in Japan and hope Japanese sports medicine is half-good and I don’t end up losing my leg before the next season even starts.” Minami shakes his head passionately. “Two, we three go, Minami stays, pines for the lost opportunities and ends up skating Eros to get Katsudon’s attention. Epic romance ensues, someone wins gold and gets married.” Minami giggles, Victor frowns. “Three,” Yuri continues, “we all go to St. Petersburg, I get to keep my leg and my career, Minami gets to keep his coach, and you,” he points at Victor, “get to keep your husband, even though I have no idea why he’s still putting up with you.” It’s all Victor’s fault to begin with; he was the one who fucked something up with Minami’s invitation, and it somehow resulted in Minami not getting a proper student’s visa. “And all we need to do is get one stupid paper.”

“That’s definitely not all our options,” Katsudon objects. “You’re being overly dramatic.”

Yuri. Dramatic. What the fuck. “Yeah, right,” he replies, annoyed. “I’m dramatic. And we also have all those half-measures where Minami goes back to Japan when his visa runs out mid-training, or I go to Russia alone and pull Yakov out of retirement and Lilia out of Paris. And don’t forget the brilliant option of me going with Victor and you staying with Minami, or vice versa. Because that will be fun. And not dramatic at all.” Without Katsudon’s input, Victor’s the worst coach in history. Without Victor around, Katsudon’s a ball of never-ending pining and angst. 

“I’ll be forever in your debt,” Minami says. 

“Are you siding with—wait. Was that a yes?”

“It’s… Not the worst idea? You don’t have to do this, obviously, and I’ll owe you for the rest of my life, obviously. But it’s a solution. We can always get divorced if one of us meets someone.”

Yuri highly doubts he’ll ‘meet someone’. He’s got exactly three friends, counting his fake-husband-to-be, and has been married to skating since he was ten - that will be exactly half of his life in less than a year.

“I want cool rings,” he insists, “and you,” he points at Victor, “are paying for them.”

 

**2**

A Russian wedding ceremony is painfully un-ceremonial. Minami’s never seen a Russian wedding before, but he has to assume that the official part isn’t always this ridiculous. Otherwise, he might lose some of his respect for the nation.

A bored lady wearing an ugly flower dress and a fake smile gives them a lecture in Russian, and a visibly terrified state-provided interpreter who looks even younger than Plisetsky pretends to offer Minami a Japanese translation, but his Japanese pronunciation is so unfortunate that Plisetsky’s biting his lips to keep himself from laughing, Yuri-kun’s trying hard to keep a straight face, and Nikiforov isn’t even trying, giggling at the funnier bits. Minami would probably find it amusing, too—the lecture on how important marriage is and how blessed they are to be entering this new period of their lives, delivered with a multitude of very silly mistakes—but he tries to show some respect to the growing professional, reminding himself that his own Russian is significantly worse. 

The “Is your intention to enter into this marriage mutual and voluntary?” sounds like a correct translation, more or less, because it’s just as unromantic as the entire setting.

Plisetsky says “Yes” in Russian, Minami says it in Japanese and has the interpreter translate it as the procedure requires, and then the two of them sign where they’re told to sign. After some more lecturing (he can swear the lady looks like she’s going to give them a quiz after), they exchange the rings, and that’s the brightest part of it, because Yuri’s design is brilliant, Minami absolutely adores the way the rings turned out and has been impatiently looking forward to getting to wear them.

The translator says, “Congratulate each other,” and Plisetsky dips and kisses him firmly on the lips, and Minami can feel him smiling into the kiss. He wraps his arms around his new fake-husband and deepens the kiss. Nikiforov applauds, Yuri-kun takes pictures, and the lady keeps lecturing, nonpulsed. 

When they pull apart, the lecturing lady says, if the interpreter is to be believed, “I’m handing your first family document, your marriage certificate, to the head of the family,” and gives the paper to Minami. Plisetsky chokes on a grunt or a laugh, but the lady ignores him and continues, “Hold on to it, and let your life never be a boring spectacle, but instead a real celebration of joy and mutual understanding.”

That’s when Plisetsky finally loses it.

So, Minami’s fake-marriage starts with him holding the marriage certificate to his chest while trying to comfort his hysterically laughing fake-husband and apologize to the possibly deeply offended state official at the same time, hoping she speaks at least a little English, because their coaching team are of no help at all. Good thing they’ve already signed everything, or else they might have been evicted without getting what they came for.

 

**3**

“Why the fuck is he the head of the family!?” Yuri demands, as soon as they leave the room bumping into another couple in the process. “I have more medals. And it’s my fucking country.” It’s stupid. He never agreed to this. Is is too late to change his mind?

“There’s only one marriage certificate,” Victor explains, “and they always give it to the older spouse.”

“That’s absolutely idiotic,” Yuri insists.

“Here,” his fake-husband says apologetically. “You can have it if you want. And Potya is the head of your family, anyway; I don’t think she’ll relinquish that privilege just because you got fake-married.”

“Easy on the f-word,” Victor tells him. “At least wait until we leave the building.”

“I’ll give you another f-word,” Yuri tells him. “If their fucking English is anywhere as good as their fucking Japanese, they won’t be able tell the fucking difference.”

Then he looks at the paper Minami handed to him. It’s an ugly pink paper, but they somehow managed to spell “Kenjirou” right. 

The tiger on his wedding ring grins at him.

 

**4**

The first time Plisetsky threatens to divorce him, Kenjirou almost takes him seriously, and frantically tries to figure out how he’s going to get his student’s visa right this time, and spend the four months it’s going to take training at his old rink. It will be a step down from Katsuki-Nikiforov coaching team, but it’s definitely not a life-threatening tragedy, he can do that.

It’s Nikiforov who reassures him that his fake-husband doesn’t really mean it.

It actually happened because of Nikiforov himself—or, well, of course it’s because of Minami; it’s always because of Minami, but Nikiforov is the trigger.

Kenjirou’s been calling him “Nikiforov-san”. It’s proper. The most appropriate way of address would be Nikiforov-sensei, but that makes Nikiforov laugh, and, therefore, feels like an insult in the context.

Context is everything, because the first time Kenjirou uses “Nikiforov-san” around Plisetsky after the wedding, his fake-husband yells at him, and it sounds like he’s been holding that back for quite some time.

“What the fuck, Minami, does he even look like a ‘-san’ material to you? He’s a stupid old man who forgets things! He’s nobody’s ‘-san’! Stop fucking ‘-san’ing him, idiot!”

Minami doesn’t see how anyone can be or not be ‘-san material’. It’s simply a form of address, just this side of appropriate for their working relationship. Nor does he get why Yuri’s so passionate about this now, if it didn’t seem to bother him before the fake-wedding.

“You’re speaking English, Minami!” Plisetsky reasons after yet another ‘-san’. “Your -sans aren’t even in English.” 

The English ‘Mr. Nikiforov’ doesn’t work, either, because, according to Plisetsky, it sounds as bad as ‘-san’, even if more English. Plisetsky isn’t making any sense.

“And you can call me Victor,” Nikiforov tells him, “or Vitya, if you prefer that.” 

Kenjirou doesn’t ‘prefer that’. He can’t address his choreographer with a nickname!

“What’s the proper way of address in Russia?” he asks. He feels like he’s supposed to know that by now; he’s been living in Russia for more than two months, fake-married to a Russian for over a week. But Russia is confusing, there’s so much to learn at once. His scheduele, with all the moving, and the training, and visiting Yuri in the hospitals and helping him with his physio only allowed Minami to start his Russian classes five days ago.

“Just my first name,” Victor insists.

“Or first name and patronymic, if you want to show respect.” Yuri-kun tells him, “Which you don’t have to. Victor knows you respect him regardless of how you say his name.”

“What’s your patronymic?” Kenjirou asks Victor.

“Yaroslavovich,” Victor tells him with a small smile. “Victor Yaroslavovich.”

“Yarosuru—” Kenjirou tries.

“That’s it!” Plisetsky, yells. “I can’t be married to a man who can’t even use a first name. Your excess of respect is fucking disrespectful in itself, do you know that?!”

That, of course, makes no sense whatsoever.

“I’ll go get you your fucking divorce papers,” Plisetsky throws at him. “And while I’m gone, you fucking learn to use people’s first names, Minami. I’m Yura. He’s Victor.” With that, Plisetsky leaves the rink, loudly slamming the door. 

The irony of being addressed with his last name isn’t lost on Kenjirou.

He gets back to his short program, but he’s upset and distracted, and doesn’t do very well. That doesn’t go past Nikiforov. “Something wrong?” he asks. 

Kenjirou doesn’t answer, because isn’t it obvious? Plisetsky is being unreasonable, but this arrangement is a huge favour, and he’s free to withdraw it wherever he pleases. Even if Kenjirou only gets one week in Russia out of it, it’d still be worth it.

“Wait, did you take Yurio seriously?” Victor demands. “Do you really think you’re going to be served divorce papers for dinner?”

Kenjirou shrugs helplessly.

“Trust me, Yurio can be stubborn and arrogant, but he’s nowhere nearly as selfish as that. He never meant for you to take it seriously, trust me. He won’t throw you out of the country just because he doesn’t like the way you address someone. He’s probably gone to the bathroom, or to get coffee.”

Minami really doesn’t know his fake-husband very well; outside of the few times they ended up in bed together before Yuri-kun offered to coach Minami, they spent less than a month training together in Japan, and in the two months in St. Petersburg Yuri was in and out of hospitals with his injury, which didn’t make him eager to talk at all. Victor’s known him for almost a decade; if he says he isn’t serious, he’s probably right.

If so, he feels he’s perfectly entitled to time his “Thank you, sensei” with Plisetsky’s return and watch him swear loudly, spill his coffee, and then swear some more. 

 

**5**

“Our marriage is based on a lie,” Yuri claims, outraged. 

Here he was thinking that his fake-husband was a cat person. Minami adores Potya, spoils her like crazy and even admits she’s the head of the family; they have a tiger on their wedding rings; what else was Yuri supposed to think? And yet, here is his fake-husband, telling Makkachin that he is the best creature in the universe, repeatedly, in two and a half languages. Yuri feels betrayed.

“Well, yes, of course, it is,” Minami says, without even looking up from Makka.

“Which lie is it today?” Victor asks. 

“I married a man who loves dogs!” Yuri exclaims. “This is a disaster.”

“So did I,” says Victor cheerfully. “Worked out all right.”

He’s lucky Katsudon isn’t home yet. ‘All right’? Seriously?

“Next time I get fake-married, I’ll be sure to mention my love for everything cute and fluffy before the wedding,” Minami promises, and Yuri feels an unexplainable pang of annoyance at the declaration.

“Wait ‘til I divorce you—then you can go to Thailand and cuddle all of Chulanont’s hamsters all you like. Are they cute and fluffy enough for you?”

“I like hamsters,” his stupid fake-husband agrees, nonplussed. “Maybe Cialdini-sensei will take me in.”

“What? Why would you need Celestino to take you in?” Katsudon asks from the front door. No one even noticed him open it. 

“Yuri’s divorcing him,” Victor explains. “I think it’s the third time this week.”

“Out of the question,” Katsudon protests. “He’s my best student, I’m not giving him up.”

Yuri’s secretly proud of Katsudon’s newly acquired ability to deliver poorly disguised insults, and Minami gets a ten-gigawatt smile at the praise, but he still can’t let it slide. “Your best student has yet to defeat your second-best student in competition, pig, so shut your stupid mouth and make us dinner,” he suggests. It doesn’t matter that Minami hasn’t started competing under Katsuki yet, it’s the principle of things.

Minami squeaks in protest, predictably outraged. He’s yet to accept that this particular coach-student relationship is as far from his “senseis” and “arigatos” as it can possibly get. He’ll learn.

“I should give you back to Victor,” Katsuki threatens, “and see who wins then.”

This old threat isn’t working anymore, seeing how Katsudon never delivers. What it does is make Victor pout, which leads to Katsudon giving his husband an apologetic kiss and those two inevitably getting gross again.

Yuri looks at his two stupid ‘mentors’ making out like they’re alone in the room, and then at his stupid fake-husband, shamelessly cuddling Makkachin on the couch. 

Traitors. All of them.

 

**6**

Minami wakes up to something soft hitting him on the forehead. He isn’t sure if he dreamt it, so he turns around and tries to go back to sleep. 

Something hits him on the back of his head. Then again. He opens his eyes and turns to see what’s going on.

His fake-husband is sitting on the floor under the TV, holding a bag of plush Pokeballs. Three of the balls are on the floor next to the couch where Minami, apparently, fell asleep last night.

The fourth ball hits Kenjirou on the nose as he tries to sit up. “What’s this about?” he asks, rubbing his eyes in a futile effort to keep them open.

“I saw these at the store,” Yuri explains, “and figured, since I’m fake-married to a real pokemon, I need a lot of them.”

“And now you’re trying to capture me,” Kenjirou says and yawns.

Yuri nods, enthusiastically. “And then I’ll see what you’ll evolve into.”

“For that, you’re going to need candy.” He probably should argue with being called a pokemon, but he’s too sleepy for that. “How many Kenjirous do you have stuffed in the closet to trade for candy?”

“Wouldn’t you want to know,” Plisetsky tells him and tosses him something small. Kenjirou catches whatever it is reflexively, and then inspects it. It’s a candy, with half-golden, half-red wrapping. He has to admit he approves of the colour scheme. He unwraps it and finds that approves of the taste, too, although it’s probably way too sweet for his diet.

“Trade them all,” he demands, nodding at the general direction of the closet, “I need more of these.” 

Yuri tosses another candy. “Why am I feeding you, anyway? It’s your turn to make breakfast.”

“Because you woke me up?”

“How are you supposed to make me breakfast if you’re asleep?”

Kenjirou groans and moves to get up again. This time, he feels every single muscle of his body protest. He winces and moans—and for that, gets hit with another Pokeball.

“I told you not to sleep on that bloody couch,” his fake-husband tells him. “We’ve got a perfectly good bed.”

Minami tried to give Yuri some space and sleep on the couch when he first moved in here. That was before the wedding, so Yuri couldn’t threaten him with divorce yet, but he did yell quite a bit. Evidently, according to Yuri Plisetsky, sleeping on the couch is a criminal offence.

“I fell asleep,” Kenjirou hurries to explain. “Unintentionally.”

The next ball thrown at him, he catches. “What do you evolve into?” he asks, throwing the ball back at Yuri.

Yuri dodges it. “Myself, only better. Or I would, if I were a pokemon.”

“Oh, so, now I’m a pokemon and you aren’t?”

“Well, duh. Have you seen yourself in the mirror?”

“How old are you, again?” Minami asks, going from relaxed to annoyed in a fraction of a second.

“What, that bad?” Yuri asks. “What did I say?”

They’re kind of developing a ridiculous language where hit-below-the-belt jokes are fair play in reply to other hit-below-the-belt jokes, accidental or not.

“Hair joke?” Minami explains. “I happen to like my hair the way it is. And I don’t like people mocking it.”

“Oh, fuck you! I didn’t mean it like that.” From Plisetsky, that’s almost an apology. “And also, I’m nineteen. The joke’s getting old.”

“I’ll always be three years older.”

“Yeah, so, you’re getting old faster than the joke. Anyway, are you going to feed me any time this year? I don’t usually eat pokemons, but if there’s no other food…”

“For sexual innuendo, this was disastrous. For an actual threat, unconvincing.”

“Okay then, how’s this for a threat,” Yuri throwsanother Pokeball and Kenjirou catchesit without looking. “If you don’t feed me right now, I’ll divorce the hell out of you.”

Kenjirou pretends to be terrified. It is, in fact, his turn to make breakfast.

 

**7**

“That’s it, I’m divorcing you,” Yuri informs his fake-husband. He isn’t supposed to be at the rink today, but he came all this way to announce the divorce, because THIS is UNACCEPTABLE. 

“What? What did I do?”

“As if you need to do anything for Yurio to divorce you!” Victor laughs.

“This!” Yuri explains, ignoring Victor’s mocking. “You bought THIS. You brought it into OUR HOME!” 

It was a terrible offence. Absolutely unforgivable; one can never move on from something like THAT. Yuri tosses the offending item at his stupid fake-husband.

“It’s a book!” Minami squeaks, catching it. 

Victor glances at the bloody thing. “I’m sorry to say that, Kenjirou, but I’m afraid this time you are getting divorced, and nothing can save you.”

“Right?!” Yuri demands, “Right!? How could you do this to me?! I LIKED you!”

Minami looks at the fucking book, then at Yuri, then at the book again.

“Okay,” he says, at last. “If you want a divorce, have your divorce. But can I at least know what I did to cause it?” Those fucking puppy-eyes should be illegal.

“How long have you two been married, again?” Victor asks, because he’s an ass like that.

“Fake-married!” Yuri screams. The distinction has never been more important, puppy-eyes or not. Yuri’s a cat person anyway.

“A month,” Minami says at the same time, “and six days.”

“And never did it ever in a month and six days come up that Yuri isn’t a fan of Jean-Jacques Leroy?”

“Uhm... not really?”

Yuri pauses to think. It’s not like he’s in a habit of talking about Leroy, of all people. And in the two years before the fake-marriage, Minami really never happened to be at the same competition with both Yuri and JJ. There’s a good chance it really never came up until now. Yuri takes a deep breath.

“So, you...dislike JJ?” Minami asks before Yuri can pick an explanation that doesn’t involve swearing in Russian. “And you don’t want his book in your home?”

That pretty much covers it, and with no swearing, even. Yuri nods.

“Okay,” Minami says, and throws the book into the nearest dustbin. It’s a good throw, very precise. Were he twice as tall, he would have made a hell of a career in basketball. “I’ll keep that in mind.” 

Yuri’s apparently caught the idiot virus from his idiot fake-husband, because he’s just standing there, dumbfounded. It’s a fucking expensive book. Fucking pokemon, what the fuck.

“Keep him, Yurio,” Victor advises. “He’s a fast learner.”

“Shut up, old man,” he retaliates, and then turns to Minami, “Okay, I won’t divorce you this time. But stop wasting money on JJ. I know where to pirate this stuff.”

Minami gives him the brightest smile in the universe.

 

**8**

“Is this—” Minami’s sitting on the floor of Yuri’s closet, holding a priceless item in his hands. He cannot believe his eyes.

“Fuck,” Yuri says when he sees it. “Fuck! I shouldn’t have let you do this. Now I’m going to have to kill you.”

Death for an attempt to tidy Yuri’s closet? That would have been pretty tragic, if not for this discovery. The way it is, Minami would be perfectly happy to accept death while still sitting right here on the dusty closet floor.

It is, it really is a 2013 poster, signed. There were only, like, twenty of those in the world, because pre-Victor Yuri-kun was never too keen on signing merchandise. Minami spent months trying to get his hands on one of these, but finally gave up, discovering that even when when he did manage to catch one on E-bay, the price was so high that he’d probably have to save for it for decades. 

“Shut the fuck up, Minami.” Plisetsky demands.

“I haven’t said anything.” He’s not sure what to say. He’s still getting over the awe of holding the priceless item in his hands. He finishes unfolding it carefully. On it, Yuri-kun looks both a little younger and a hundred years older than he is in person. Kenjirou never noticed that in the pictures he saw of the poster online—his smile looks forced, just a little. 

“Stop perving on our coach,” his fake-husband demands.

“Oh, shut up, I’m perving on my idol who happens to be our coach. He’s the reason I’m skating, I’ll perv all I like,” Kenjirou informs him. Then he pauses, considers how he’s always defending his right to be Yuri-kun’s fan, and adds, “What’s your excuse?”

Yuri blushes. “Get the hell out of there and leave them alone,” he says. “I’ll tidy it when I have the time.”

Minami has been in St.Petersburg for months now, and he’s fully aware that his fake-husband never has ‘the time’. 

“You said it yourself, it’s stupid to have a perfectly functional closet and keep the stuff piled on the floor because there’s nowhere to put it,” Kenjirou reasons. Also, ‘them’? As in, more than one?

He turns back to the same corner of the closet where he found the poster, and, surely, finds more. There are about a dozen of them, each rolled in a tube and carefully wrapped in an yellow-ish Russian newspaper. Kenjirou considers commenting that this is not how you store priceless collectables, but then thinks better of it.

As he reaches to get one of them, Yuri jumps on top of him like a giant cat and tackles him to lie on the floor, grabbing his wrists in an attempt to keep him from getting to the posters. Minami tries to fight back, but Yuri’s physically stronger, and also has gravity on his side, so instead of freeing his wrists, Minami ends up held down to the floor with his fake-husband’s full weight. Seeing no other way out, he relaxes for a second, pretending to surrender (Yuri falls for that sometimes), and then bites the part of Yuri he can reach, which at that moment happens to be his shoulder, just under the shirt collar. 

Yuri hisses and unthinkingly releases one of Minami’s hands combat the biting, which, of course, gets his hand bitten and, thanks to Kenjirou’s successfully released hand, his side tickled at the same time. He yelps and tries to recapture the hand again, but Kenjirou already has the advantage he needs, so he bites and tickles him again wherever he can reach, to ensure he’s properly distracted from his other hand that’s still holding Minami’s wrist.

Growing up with three little sisters lands you with certain skillset that is, with adjustments, usable even when your intentions are very far from brotherly. 

Having rescued his second wrist when Yuri concentrated on fighting off the bites, Kenjirou places his hands strategically at Yuri’s armpits (which Yuri can’t do to him, because he’s now leaning on his elbows) and bites his ear.

If there were more space in the closet, Yuri’s whine would be the sign for Minami to use the distraction to get on top of him and accept his surrender. The closet is too small to throw grown-up men around it, though, so Kenjirou improvises. He wraps his legs around his fake-husband’s hips and carefully breathes in his ear, touching it with his tongue just barely. Yuri curses in Russian. 

Kenjirou’s never had sex in a closet before, but he’s always open to new experiences.

About an hour later he comes out of the shower to see his fake-husband on the living room floor, surrounded by the posters. He joins him on the floor and is instantly stunned by the sheer awesomeness of the collection.

There’s the very first poster of Yuri-kun ever issued, a Japanese-only release from his early Junior days. Unsigned, but in almost perfect condition, only damaged by the barbaric way it was stored. There’s one with Yuri-kun in his FS costume in 2014, not even remotely a limited edition (it was all over Japan that year), but it’s signed, although there was never an official signing of that one. There’s one with him in his short program outfit for that year, too; that one was officially signed, but the autograph on Yuri’s copy looks like it was made with the same pen as the one on the FS poster. There are several Japanese-only posters from Yuri-kun’s Juniors, and some of them also look like they were signed at the same time—but some don’t. 

Yuri’s quiet as he lets Kenjirou inspect the posters. Only two of them—the first one and the one with Minami’s favourite costume—look like they were on a wall at some point, but those two look like they were there for a long time.

Overall, there are eleven posters, three of them unofficial. Seven are signed, including one of the fakes and the priceless 2013 one. 

“How did you get them signed?” he asks, because that seems like a safe question. The dating of the latest poster makes him assume that all of the posters are from before Yuri and their coach really met.

“I—I didn’t,” Yuri says. “It’s Giacometti. He’d get Katsuki to sign them and then send them to me for every holiday he could think of. He thought he was funny.”

“So, it’s a joke between you and Giacometti?” Kenjirou met Giacometti a few times at competitions, and the man did, in fact, leave an impression of someone with a sense of humor weird enough to keep a practical joke like that going for years.

“Kind of? Not really? He recognised this one,” Yuri points at the poster with The Costume, “on the wall in one of my selfies before I noticed it was there and took it down.” 

“Oh.”

“I maybe looked up to him as a kid, okay? Everyone was screaming ‘Victor’, but Victor was always good at everything, you know? It doesn’t take guts to be the best if you’re always good. And Katsuki—do you remember that program, his last year in Juniors?” Minami nods. Of course he knows all of them. “He got silver on your nationals, and then it got out that he’d pulled an ankle just before his free skate, and didn’t even know if it was broken or just sprained. So, he skated for a silver medal with a pulled ankle, and no one even suspected. Popovich showed it to me when I broke my wrist, my first year here in Piter. Well, among other things, he has a fucking collection of inspirational stories about skaters. But this one stuck. So, Gosha gave me this poster as a ‘get well soon’ gift. I don’t think he even—”

Kenjirou kisses him. There’s no way he can find the words to express the joy he’s feeling, but he can, indeed, kiss his fake-husband until he gets the message across. 

 

**9**

Yuri comes home from an especially tiresome training session and finds his fake-husband in the kitchen, cooking dinner. That’s his first clue that something’s not right, because the pokemon never cooks unless he absolutely has to. 

“Who’d you kill?” he asks when he gets ‘How was your day?’ and a gentle kiss that are also both fucking atypical. 

“Why would you ask that?” Minami says, all fake innocence. 

“Oh, let me see,” Yuri says. “Exhibit A. You’re cooking. Exhibit B. You’re cooking dinner. Exhibit C. It’s not your turn to cook. I think the verdict’s pretty obvious.”

“Can we eat first?” his fake-husband begs. 

It must be bad. Yuri’s starving, of course, but this must be absolutely horrible if Minami’s so terrified of talking about it, so he isn’t sure dinner is a good idea right now.

“Please?” Minami begs again, pulling his illegal puppy-eyes, and Yuri gives in. 

His fake-husband made something with an unpronounceable Japanese name, and the something is incredibly delicious and not one of Katsubasan’s recipes, because Yuri’s never had it before. There are vegetables. And eggs. And chicken. It’s probably the best thing Yuri’s had since katsudon pirozhki. Okay, he might be a little biased because he’s fucking starving. But it’s still divine. 

When he’s done with his meal, he’s almost eager to help his fake-husband hide the body. If it’s Victor’s body, at least. Or Katsudon’s, although Minami would never kill his beloved Katsudon. 

“So, talk,” he demands. “Where’s the body?”

“Please don’t divorce me!” Minami begs. “Or if you do, give us time to find a place to stay?”

‘Us’? The sense of doom the amazing meal almost suppressed comes crawling back. Who the hell are ‘us’? It’s not like they ever agreed to be exclusive, of course, but how the fuck do you go from—what they were doing together early this morning—to an ‘us’ with someone else in less than twelve hours?

“Who’s ‘us’?” Yuri asks, telling himself he’s calm, absolutely calm. 

Minami starts walking towards the bedroom. He should be walking faster or Yuri’s gonna lose it.

“Don’t divorce me!” his fake-husband says again, opening the door. “I promise I’ll take care of them myself!” 

‘Them?’

There’s a box on the floor at the foot of their bed. Something’s moving inside that box, making a soft scratching noise. The relief Yuri feels is comparable to how he felt when the doctors told him he’d definitely skate again and won’t even have to miss the season. Now Yuri hopes the living things in the box aren’t puppies or a snakes, but he’d take either or even both over all human-shaped versions he’s managed to come up with.

He comes closer and glances inside the box. 

The kittens look like they’re about two months old. The calico one (probably a girl, then) gives him a dirty look, and the black kitten whose gender is yet to be determined is curled up in the corner. Neither of them looks particularly interested in the human drama; Yuri can appreciate that.

“So, that’s your ‘us’ now?” Yuri asks, trying to keep a straight face. The stupid pokemon deserves at least some shit for what he’s just put him through. “You’re adopting cats while I’m away now?”

Minami looks like he’s trying to get small enough to fit in that box. He’s almost successful, even. “A little girl was giving them away at the metro station,” he says. “She said—I think she said, her English wasn’t very good—that her parents wanted to drown them. I mean, look at them! Drown!”

If Yuri doesn’t vacate the premises right now, things might get physical. He’s still mad at his fake-husband for making him worry (and making him wonder if ‘worry’ is the right word to express the overwhelming feeling), but he’s also maybe a little in love with him for saving the kittens - so he isn’t even sure which kind of physical it will be. 

He walks out of the bedroom, grabs a post-it from the fridge and scribes an address on it.

“Here,” he tells the pokemon. “Call a taxi, this is your destination. I’ll be right back.”

He picks up his wallet and leaves without waiting for an answer. 

It’s half past eight, and the pet store across the street closes at nine, so he almost runs, hoping they don’t decide to close early. Once there, he picks up a cat carrier, a bag of kitten food because the pokemon obviously didn’t think about that, two bowls, and a treat for Potya who’s going to need a lot of comforting now. 

When he comes back, he finds his fake-husband sitting on the sofa, both kittens in his lap, looking so damn miserable that Yuri almost feels guilty. Almost. 

“Where’s the taxi?” he asks.

Minai looks up, takes in the sight of Yuri with the purchases, and—lights up. Like a fucking sun after a storm. Like if the electricity in the entire city goes off, there’ll still be enough light in the room. 

“On its way, probably,” he shows Yuri his phone. “I got a text, but it’s in Russian, so I don’t know what it means.” Occasionally, Yuri forgets how fucking helpless his fake-husband is sometimes in this city. 

The text says that the taxi’s on its way. “Okay, good,” Yuri says. “We’re going to the vet. I take it they didn’t come with a set of documents?”

“They came with a box.”

“And you didn’t ask the girl if they’re sterilized, or vaccinated, or housetrained?”

Kenjirou looks guilty. 

“Never mind. They’re probably none of those, seeing how they wanted to fucking kill them.”

Minami’s phone chimes. 

“Come on, get them inside,” Yuri commands. “The car’s waiting.”

Together, they put the kittens into the carrier. The calico girl hisses and complains, and the black kitten (who turns out to be a boy) pretends he doesn’t give a fuck. Yuri loves that guy, he’ll go places.

“So, what made you think I’d divorce you for kittens?” he asks when they’re in the car. “They’re kittens! You saved their lives! And we’ve already got a cat!”

Minami has the decency to look embarrassed. “Yeah, exactly? We’ve already got Potya, and you never agreed to having three cats? And also, Potya didn’t like them.”

Of course she didn’t. She doesn’t like anyone at first, that’s her fucking superpower. “She’ll deal,” he promises, and gets a smile so bright he’s surprised he doesn’t go blind. “Anyway,” he continues before he completely melts, “the girl is Paddi.” 

“As in, Patrick?”

“As in, Psychosomatic, Addict, Insane.” If the pokemon asks ‘what kind of name is that’ or something equally stupid, Yuri’s divorcing him and suing for custody. There’s no way he’s letting the babies grow up with someone who— 

“Prodigy?” Minami asks. “That’s so cool!” Huh. He’s not all that hopeless, is he?

“Right?” Yuri says. “I wanted to name a cat that since my my Senior debut.” He doesn’t admit that he hadn’t even heard about Prodigy until Beka started educating him; some things people aren’t supposed to know about their fake spouses. “It’s the coolest name ever.”

“I don’t know, Puma Tiger Scorpion is awesome, too,” Minami says, “and that sets standards. How are we calling the other one?”

That’s a big question they only get to answer after two hours of queues, blood tests, doctors, and queues again; the good thing about this particular vet clinic is that it’s open 24 hours and you don’t have to make an appointment. The bad thing is that everyone else comes without an appointment, too, so the queues are epic. 

Paddi doesn’t appreciate being manhandled. She hisses, claws at the doctors and demands to be left the hell alone Right Now; after all the time Yuri spent in hospitals this year, he certainly can relate.

The black kitten, however, remains calm the entire time. He doesn’t scream, doesn’t hiss, doesn’t try to fight; he just looks—and if looks could kill, there’d be an entire vet clinic full of dead bodies right after the blood test. 

“He looks like he’s going to destroy us all the moment he gets old enough,” Minami comments when they’re waiting in the queue again. “Not all cats grow up to be strong enough to destroy the world, but this one probably will.”

Yuri nods in agreement and reaches to pat the kitten, earning a protective hiss from his sister. 

“He also looks like he owns us, not the other way around,” Minami continues, “and I’d blame it on Potya, but they didn’t spend ten minutes in her company.”

With all Yuri’s due respect for his older cat, Potya’s attitude has nothing on this guy’s.

“Master of the Universe,” Minami says.

“What?”

“The name. Master of the Universe. Sounds like him, doesn’t it?” 

Yuri considers it. It’s not a bad idea at all, but something’s amiss. Minami seems to pick up on it. “Cool Master of the Universe?” 

‘Cool’ is good, but somehow not enough. “Fierce Master of the Universe,” Yuri says. “I’m sure he’s fierce deep inside. He just doesn’t show it to us mere mortals.”

“Fumi,” Kenjirou summarizes. “I like it.” 

Fumi approves of his name, and his sister, for once, doesn’t object.

 

**10**

“What the fuck is this?” Yuri demands, pointing at an innocent can on the kitchen counter.

Sometimes Minami sees Russian food in packages that hint absolutely nothing about the contents. He’s recently acquired a hobby of buying such food and trying to guess what’s inside before opening it. His success rate isn’t very high; so far he can only guess it’s canned vegetables if it comes from a shelf with canned vegetables, meat if i comes from a shelf with meat, and dairy if it comes from a shelf with dairy. If it’s a shelf with sweets, it’s not always sweet. 

This can is just as mysterious as most of his findings. It looks like a can of meat preserves, even has a cow on it, but Minami picked it from a shelf next to the one with dairy. There were cans, bottles and bags with a blue pattern on the same shelf, but Kenjirou chose the only can that was brown. 

His best guess is misplaced meat preserves. His second guess is something to do with milk, because that’s where he found it; maybe condensed milk, because it’s in a can. Neither milk nor meat preserves, however, call for ‘what the fuck’.

“I don’t know what it is,” he confesses and picks up Paddi in case he needs protection. “That’s exactly why I bought it. Is it... bad?”

“It’s an abomination,” Yuri proclaims. “A terrible substance that has no right to exist. Have you even read the contents?”

“They’re in Russian,” Minami explains. Paddi demands satisfaction for being distracted from her rest, and Kenjirou open a fresh pack of cat treats for her.

“Oh, good, then, you were going to eat this random crap that can be anything, just because it’s fun.”

He shrugs. He doesn’t really eat the “random crap” beyond sniffing the first teaspoon without googling the ingredients; he’s not that much of an idiot. It’s just no fun googling them in advance. 

“Throw it away,” his fake-husband demands. “I’ll show you how it’s done.”

“How what’s done?” Minami asks, offering Paddi a treat. “And can I at least open it to see what’s inside? Or does it stink or something?”

“Fine. Go ahead and open it—wait, no. Put it away. We’ll open both at the same time, and if you somehow fail to see the difference, I’m divorcing you, I really am. And also, stop spoiling the children,” with that, Yuri grabs some of the cat treat and, contradicting himself, gives some to Fumi, who munches on it enthusiastically.

Satisfied, Yuri gets back to the offending mysterious can and throws it into the corner of a kitchen cupboard, and then he falls on the couch and calls Otabek—apparently, to complain about Minami’s poor food choices, because the first thing he says is in English, obviously for Minami’s benefit: “Do you know what this idiot bought today?”

The next sentence is in Russian, and Minami doesn’t recognize the word he used to describe the mysterious can, so he picks up what’s left of the cat treat and goes to find Potya. It never hurts to have the cats on his side.

On Saturday morning, Yuri comes home bearing two of those blue cans Minami didn’t buy. He throws one of them at Kenjirou without warning, and Minami almost drops it because it’s heavier than he expected.

“Can you guess what it is?”

Kenjirou looks at the can. It has МОЛОКО written on it with huge white letters, very hard to miss. He isn’t sure the other cans had that word; he would have recognized the Russian for “milk” if he saw it.

“Condensed milk?” he guesses. 

“Somebody give this man a medal,” his fake-husband replies. “Of course it’s condensed milk. Although if you ask our nutritionists, they’ll tell you it’s condensed sugar.”

“Is it that sweet? I’ve never tried it,” he confesses. He doesn’t like strawberries with milk.

“Fuck, you’re hopeless,” Yuri says, and reaches into a cupboard, pulling out a cooking pot. Then he thinks for a second and ruffles in another cupboard, coming up with a metal hot mat.

He puts the hot mat into the pot, places the can on top of it, and then pours tap water into the pot and puts it on the stove.

Kenjirou should probably ask why Yuri’s trying to boil a can of milk like it’s a potato, but what comes out instead, it, “What’s the hot mat for?”

“So that it won’t explode, idiot. Physics. It heats up, it explodes, sticky mess everywhere.”

With that, he lights up the stove. 

“It doesn’t look like you’re trying to keep it from heating up,” Kenjirou remarks.

“No, that’s right, I’m not,” Yuri tells him and absolutely refuses to explain what all of it is about.

Turns out, boiling a can of condensed milk is a time-consuming affair. They do some chores, then play some videogames, then get dragged into playing with the cats (those three are impossible to ignore when they gang up on the two on them), then exercise—and all that time, the can is boiling. Sometimes Yuri adds some water into the pot, or demands for Minami to do the same, but still pointedly does not explain the purpose of the ritual.

In the evening, Yuri turns off the stove and demands that Kenjirou doesn’t touch it.

“It’s hot,” he says. “And it still can explode.”

Minami probably dreams of exploding milk cans that night. He’s not admitting to anything. 

When he wakes up, he’s not entirely sure he’s really awake, because his fake-husband is standing next to the bed with that tray for breakfasts in bed that Victor gave them for their fake wedding. It’s been serving as a shelf for something in the closet ever since then. Minami’s never had breakfasts in bed before. 

Chances that he’s still asleep are incredibly high, so he decides to roll with it.

The breakfast consists of a cup of black tea and two slices of toast with something brown on them. It’s of a brighter shade of brown than Nutella, not at all as transparent as honey and not as liquid as caramel sauce. 

Yuri places the tray on the bed next to Minami, unceremoniously scoops Fumi off Minami’s chest, throws him onto his own pillow and climbs on top of Kenjirou himself, straddling his hips.

“Here,” he says triumphantly. “Go ahead, try it. Your nutritionist won’t be pleased, but it won’t kill you.”

Minami takes a bite of the toast Yuri’s holding in front of him and chews it. The taste is...familiar. It’s very sweet, with a distinct milky flavour, and... 

“It’s nama caramel!” he realizes. 

“What?” Yuri asks, taking a bite from the same slice. 

“Nama caramel. The best caramel in the world,” Minami explains, picking up the other slice. “I missed it so much, you have no idea!” 

He takes another huge bite. It tastes a little weird with bread, but it’s definitely nama caramel. He swallows and then scrapes just the caramel from the toast with his teeth, to make sure. Yeah, the taste is just a little bit different, maybe a little richer, if that’s even possible.

“You’re disgusting,” Yuri concludes as he watches him lick the caramel off the toast. “At least drink some tea. It’s better with tea.”

So, that’s why Yuri got him black tea even though they both prefer green. Because he thinks the caramel is better with black tea. 

A sip of hot black tea wakes Minami enough to put two and two together and come up with a reason for the breakfast in bed.

“That’s why you boiled the can?” he asks. “To make caramel?”

“Yeah, kind of.” Yuri looks almost like he’s disappointed. “We don’t call it caramel, though.”

“What do you call it?” Minami asks, chewing his toast, then swallows and repeats the question under Yuri’s amused glance.

“Varionaya sgoushionka,” he replies. “Boiled condensed milk. The best thing in the world.”

“I won’t argue with that,” Minami says and finishes his toast, although it no longer has any caramel on it.

“Then you’re once again not as hopeless as I feared,” Yuri tells him and takes a sip from Minami’s cup. The second toast is suspiciously missing. 

Minami takes the cup from Yuri and drinks what’s left of the tea, then puts the cup on the nightstand. 

“Thank you,” he says. “It’s delicious. Even though you ate the second toast.”

There’s a stain of caramel on Yuri’s cheek, and another one just on the tip of his nose. 

“There’s more in the kitchen,” Yuri says. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

Minami can’t think of a single reason to resist the urge to lick off those stains.

When they finally get to the kitchen, it’s past midday; too late to continue breakfast, but Yuri still insists that he opens the brown can and compares its contents to the caramel Yuri made. 

When Kenjirou admits that the ‘real sgoushionka’ is much better, Yuri grudgingly promises not to divorce him today. Another crisis averted.

 

**11**

One morning, Yuri wakes up to a suspiciously familiar melody. At first he can’t quite place it, half-awake, but then it hits him. Fucking Eros. 

He opens his eyes and sees his fake-spouse half-sitting on their shared bed with a laptop in his lap on top of the covers. The sound is barely audible, but when Yuri glances at the screen, he can see that Kenjirou’s watching Katsudon’s Eros performance at Worlds that year. The piggy even managed to be the holder of the world record in short program for exactly twenty minutes, until Yuri took it back with his own Agape. Good times, really, he misses beating the shit out of the asshole instead of having to listen to his wise advice on daily basis. But that’s not the point here. The point is—

“Are you jerking off to our coach in our bed?” he asks.

Minami looks startled, and then he fucking giggles. Giggles!

“Is that how it looks like?” he asks.

Fuck yes that’s how it looks like. “You could have at least waited until I divorced you,” Yuri grunts. “I don’t have to watch you do it.”

Kenjirou giggles again. “I can run another video,” he offers. “I have a collection of the most inspirational performances of the past few years.”

“Oh, let me guess. Eros, Yuri on Ice, Stammi Vicino the duet, another Yuri on Ice or two, You Raise me Up—” the last one was Katsudon’s exhibition program the year after Yuri’s debut, it was so fucking sweet and cheesy that half the audience probably lost their teeth.

“Yeah. And Samarkand, King and the Skater, Agape, Welcome to the Madness, and—see for yourself,” Kenjirou says and turns the laptop to Yuri. The folder is, indeed, full of videos, all carefully labeled with dates, names of the athletes, and titles of the songs they were performing to. Yuri takes a close look. Samarkand, check. King and the Skater, check. A couple of dozen more titles, including some Yuri doesn’t recognize—check. None of them his own. Not a single one of them; Agape and Welcome to the Madness are very definitely not there.

He gives his soon-to-be-ex-fake-husband a look long enough to make the pokemon blush.

“What?” the idiot asks. 

“Oh, I don’t know, nothing?” Yuri says. “Apart from the fact that you’ve got a collection of everyone’s performances, including that weirdo Vasiliev who would have stayed in Juniors until he turned sixty if that were allowed, but not a single one of me? What are you doing in my bed, anyway?” 

Minami has the nerve to look puzzled for a second, and then something clicks in his head. “Oh,” he says. “Of course.”

Of fucking course.

“Scroll up,” Kenjirou suggests, “there’s another folder.”

Yuri does as he’s told, not sure what he expects to find there. The folder is titled “!!!!!”. Just like that—five exclamation marks. 

Yuri opens it. The Agape is there, as well as Welcome to the Madness, and both of Yuri’s last Junior programs, and Otabek’s 2018 SP that Yuri helped choreograph, and Victor’s and Katsudon’s short programs from the same year, and most of Yuri’s performances from then until the present moment. 

“The folder grew too big, so I made another one, with just the very best,” Kenjirou explains. “I did it last night, and it slipped my mind just now. Sorry?”

“You’re an idiot,” Yuri says, distractedly, scrolling through the list of videos. “Wait, no Allegro?”

Minami shakes his head. “You were beautiful, of course, and your performance of it, especially at GPF, was absolutely incredible, but—once I got to know you, it was so obvious that program wasn’t you that—I don’t like it. It’s beautiful and flawless and so is the exhibition that went with it, and I can only guess how much effort you put into it, and you were fifteen, but—”

“Wait, are you trying to apologize? For not liking one of my programs?”

“I’m—maybe?”

“You’re an idiot,” what else is new. “Why do you think I made Welcome to the Madness, the night before the gala that year?”

“You—what? The night before?”

“You didn’t know?” But really, how would he? It’s not like it was common knowledge. “Otabek helped me choreograph it the night before. I didn’t even have a proper costume, I bought that outfit a few days earlier in a store.”

His fake-husband looks like he’s finally rendered speechless. It’s a good look on him, too bad it only lasts for a few seconds.

“Yuri, you’re so amazing!” the pokemon screams as he gets his speech back, “I’m so lucky to know you!” He makes a move to hug and kiss Yuri, almost drops the laptop and disturbs a previously peacefully sleeping Paddi, who complains loudly. Yuri catches the laptop mid-fall. 

“And you’re a disaster of a man,” Yuri tells him. “How do you even manage to skate, with this amount of clumsiness?”

Minami doesn’t hear him. With the kitten out of the room and the laptop safely on the nightstand, there’s nothing preventing him from kissing Yuri breathless. Yuri’s token complaints aren’t taken into account.

 

**12**

Minami isn’t very fond of swearing in any language, but, apparently, St. Petersburg is a place where sometimes there’s no other way. 

Right outside their bedroom window there’s a bench, and a group of drunk teenagers acquired a habit of chilling there. It would have been perfectly fine with Kenjirou, of course, but, apparently, Russian teenagers are capable of drinking all night and singing very loudly and remarkably off-tune. Combine that with a broken air conditioner and an atypical for St. Petersburg heat wave, and it’s impossible to close the window or sleep with it open.

So, the first time it happens, Yuri hangs out of the window and screams something in Russian. Kenjirou doesn’t know the words, but if he were one of those teenagers, he’d scatter at the sound of his voice alone. They manage to get a good night’s sleep for three days in a row, but then they’re back, loud as ever. Yuri repeats the yelling, which yields similar results - for another couple of days.

The third time, Yuri refuses to get out of bed, claiming it’s Kenjirou’s turn, but Kenjirou’s attempts at polite Russian, random English and rude Japanese get him a bunch of universal gestures that, essentially, mean that the late-night concert is going to continue. After another hour of trying to sleep Yuri gets up and gives the singers his own lecture in Russian. That, unsurprisingly, gets the job done.

“You live in Russia, Minami, what the fuck,” Yuri says, getting back under the covers. “How come you don’t know how to swear yet? What the fuck do they teach you in those lessons of yours?”

The next morning, Yuri makes him repeat a bunch of words. Kenjirou knows better than to say words he doesn’t know the meaning of, so he demands translations and explanations of each of them—and finally sees his fake-husband blush with embarrassment. Using those words doesn’t make him blush. Explaining them, however? Every time. 

Apparently, ‘blyad’ means ‘whore’, but also ‘shit’ and ‘oh’ - but ‘blyadskiy’ is an adjective that means ‘fucking’. ‘Yebat’ it a verb that means ‘to fuck’, and ‘yobaniy’ is an adjective that, again, means ‘fucking’ - but ‘zayebal’ means ‘I’m fucking sick of you’, while ‘zayebis’ means ‘fucking awesome’ and ‘zayebalsya’ is ‘got fucking tired’. ‘Hui’ means ‘dick’ and ‘pizda’ means ‘cunt’, but ‘hujovo’ means ‘fuckung awful’ and ‘pizdato’ means ‘fucking great’. At the same time, ‘pizdets’ means ‘disaster’, and ‘ohuyet’ means ‘fucking wonderful’. Each rude word has dozens upon dozens of derivatives, each of them with its own meaning. It’s an entire language in itself, like Keigo in reverse, and Kenjirou’s fascinated.

He’s also never seen his husband blush so much before—or laugh so much when Kenjirou, deciding that this is fun enough to try, attempts to pronounce the words. To encourage that, Yuri shows him a rap battle. A good-looking Russian man with a huge band-aid on his neck opens the battle with a string of words none of which is probably even legal, and Kenjirou tries to replicate some of them with questionable success. But at least, it makes his fake-husband very, very happy.

“Please, Kenjirou, for everything that is holy to you,” Yuri says after yet another attempt, smiling like crazy, “don’t ever, ever say any of this in front of other Russians until you ace the pronunciation. It will ruin your reputation forever, and mine along with it.”

Minami doesn’t tell Yuri that if so, Kenjirou’s own reputation is probably already ruined by a constantly swearing fake-husband. Now that Kenjirou can recognise those words in Yuri’s speech, he’s… no, in all honesty, he’s not really surprised with how often he uses them. He remembers that Yuri’s former choreographer used to scold him for ‘unattractive language’ in English all the time, and now he knows it was probably deserved—although Minami wouldn’t exactly use the word ‘unattractive’ in this context. Too attractive is more like it.

It takes Minami about a week to learn most of the roots, and another week to train to pronounce the short speech Yuri wrote for him (much easier than the one in the rap battle) correctly enough to be understood. The Russian lessons he’s been taking help; he isn’t struggling so much with the weird sounds as he did when he just arrived here.

When the teenagers wake them up at half past twelve again, he opens the window and yells, “Ah-nu pizduyte blyad nahui otsiuda uyobki, zayebali blyad!” It’s supposed to mean “Get the fuck lost, assholes, we’re fucking sick of you”, or something like that.

At that, his fake-husband gets out of bed, too, and hangs out of the window next to Minami and adds something in fast Russian that has the kids running even faster. After that, Yuri turns to Kenjrou and gives him one of the hottest kisses in Minami’s life. 

Sleeping doesn’t really happen that night.

It’s not that he’s trying to make Yuri regret teaching him, later that week. It’s just that “Zayebal, otyebis,” feels like a fitting response to the sixteenth time Yuri called him an idiot for not landing a quad.

Yuri gasps.

“Kenjirou, are you aware this is very bad language?” Victor asks him carefully. “I don’t know what Yuri told you, but this is very rude.”

“I am aware,” Kenjirou tells him. “But are you sure this was not an appropriate response?” He’s only half sassing. There is a chance he got that wrong.

“Oh no,” Victor says. “Yuri’s a hodyachiy pizdets.” Minami would argue with defining Yuri as a ‘walking disaster’. Or not. “It’s absolutely appropriate when used at him,” Victor continues. “As long as you’re aware it’s fucking rude.”

“Thank you, sensei,” Kenjirou says politely.

The “Razvod blyad!!!” Yuri screams can probably be heard all the way to Hasetsu.

 

**13**

“These are divorce papers,” Yuri announces. “Sign here and here.”

Kenjirou looks at the papers, then back at Yuri, and then at the papers again with a horrible expression, like he cannot make sense of any of it and it hurts him to try. Then he takes a breath and—he really looks like he’s about to cry. 

“Wait, what? What’s wrong with you?” Yuri asks, and then his brain catches up. He’s an idiot. He started from the wrong side again. He begins to talk, fast, before the idiot really cries. “Kenjirou, wait,” he says. “That’s not what I mean. Give them back.” 

He grabs the papers and the pen and hides them behind his back. Kenjirou just looks at him expectantly, like he doesn’t trust his voice to speak.

“Okay, here goes,” Yuri says. “Getting fake-married to you was the fucking best decision in my life. The past ten months have been the happiest ten months in my entire existence, and that’s even with the fucking bronze medal.” The bronze medal the first year after Victor and Katsudon retired was one of the worst defeats he’s suffered, since Onsen on Ice. But he doesn’t care one bit.

Kenjirou still looks at him like he isn’t making any sense.

“So, I don’t want to remain fake-married to you,” Yuri says. “I want a real marriage, with a real wedding and for a real reason. So. Will you do me the honour of divorcing me?” he asks, with as much poignance as he can master without laughing, but then probably spoils it all by adding, “But we’re keeping the rings.”

And then the stupid pokemon does cry.

**Author's Note:**

> Credits for the kitten names go to my partner (Fumi) and my best friend (Paddi); I could never come up with something so awesome on my own. 
> 
> Please let me know if any of the Russian stuff requires some additional explanations.


End file.
